Author Archive

Are you a Netflix subscriber? Did you know that you can monitor your DVD rental queue on your My Yahoo! page? It’s easy, just follow these steps:

• Sign in to Netflix. Go to the RSS feeds page to get your rental queue feed.
• Copy the URL and paste it into the box on the Add RSS by URL page on My Yahoo!.
• Voila — your waiting list is added to your My Yahoo! page.

You can also add your recommendations list, the new release list, and even lists of the top DVD rentals by genre. So now when you fire up your My Yahoo! page in the morning to check the weather, you can also see which movie you’ll be watching that night.

Did you know that you can have a second My Yahoo! page or a third, or a fourth? Create one to track stocks and follow business news at the office. A second to update the family calendar, plan trips, find recipes at home. Even a third to follow your hobbies.

It’s easy. Here’s how.

Click Add New Page in the upper right corner of your My Yahoo! page. You can even name your pages. Once you’ve created another page, you can access it from a link in the upper right of the page.

You may already know that you can do searches directly from your My Yahoo! page. Here are a few tricks to help you save time and get more out of your search experience. To name a few:

Music shortcut – If you love music, you can search for a band name or music artist (such as Taylor Swift) and play full music tracks (not 30 second snippets – the entire song) and watch music videos right on the search results page.

Sports shortcut - Searching for your favorite NFL football, baseball, or basketball player gives you game logs, stats, news, scores & schedules, and Yahoo! Fantasy rankings right at the top of the search page.

Recipe shortcut – To help you decide what to cook tonight, you can type in the name of a cuisine or ingredients followed by “recipe” (e.g. pumpkin pie recipe) and see popular recipes to get cooking ideas.

Give it a try and see for yourself with these sample searches:
- Music shortcut: Keith Urban
- Sports shortcut: Braylon Edwards
- Recipe shortcut: chicken recipe

You can enjoy these features whether you search from your My Yahoo! page or the Yahoo! homepage. Happy searching!

Melinda
Product Marketing, Yahoo! Search

With only two weeks until Thanksgiving and the official kickoff of the holiday season, I have one thing on my mind…travel. I recently read several news articles about how traveling in the coming six weeks will be challenging because of fewer flights, rising airfare, and various fees. Despite all that, I’m incredibly excited to get back home and spend some time with family, and I’ve got the perfect travel agent in my My Yahoo! page.

First, I added the Travel Smart preloaded tab by Concierge.com. It’s great; now I have great tips on how to travel lighter and worry-free! Along with this travel advice, I can browse the travel blogs for warm vacation spots during the cold winter months after the holidays. Hmm…I wonder what the beaches in Oahu are like in January!

Ok, enough dreaming. What I’m really interested in is finding the lowest possible fares for holiday flights. My module of choice for this is the Yahoo! Farechase Low Fare Tracker. In just a few clicks, I can quickly find the cheapest flights and start the holiday travel planning process.

Whatever your plans are this holiday season, have safe travels and check out the Travel Smart preloaded tab to ease any travel concerns you might have!

Adam
- My Yahoo! Marketing

Is it just me or did Thanksgiving totally sneak up on us like a stealth turkey? Having just recovered from Halloween and a very intense Election Day, I’ve now officially got turkey on my mind.

Now, if the prospect of Thanksgiving has you feeling the holiday pressure to give up the gobble, I’m here to help ease your stress with a collection of feeds that’ll cover you from turkey (and all the fixings) to Black Friday, the biggest online shopping day of the year.

If you’re looking for comfort food holiday recipes, you’ll want to check out Simply Recipes. Not only are the food photos worth an ogle, the recipes are simple, sound delicious and have even been tested by the blogger and her family.

Though Thanksgiving is the infamous holiday when you can easily eat your weight in food, Cooking Light’s recipes can help lessen the guilt. Because their recipes are light on the fat, yet heavy on flavor, you’ll still be able to enjoy your turkey, mashed potatoes, and gravy, oh my!

Thanksgiving is about family, food, and fun. You can cover all this with FamilyFun.com’s Holiday Crafts and Recipe Ideas feed. This site has a wealth of Thanksgiving ideas and content—kid-friendly crafts, recipes, decorations, and games. It’s also a super resource for Christmas, Hanukkah, and Kwanzaa.

Even though AAA says fewer people will be traveling over the Thanksgiving holiday, you’ll still have to contend with 4.5 million people traveling by plane. Avoid the headache of airport delays with FlightStats’s Current Airport Delays feed.

You can stay one step ahead of Mother Nature and her holiday weather threats with
The Weather Channel’s National Weather Outlook feed.

The news doesn’t even slow down on turkey day, so stay informed of the latest Thanksgiving news and headlines with Yahoo! News’ feed.

And even though holiday gift deals are everywhere, there’s still Black Friday, the biggest shopping day of the year. For the latest shopping deals, you’ll want to check out Deal Catcher.com’s feed and bargain deals flagged by a community of users at Dealigg.com.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Helen
- My Yahoo! Editorial

Not too many lists put together Britney Spears and Barack Obama. In tallying the most popular searches of 2008, the pair makes the Top 10 list on Yahoo! 2008 Year in Review, which looks back at the pinnacles and pitfalls of this tumultuous year.

While a top 10 may be an intriguing way to review what preoccupied our minds in the past year, that doesn’t even begin to cover the many trends and themes that emerged, from politics to economy, from Olympics to breaking news. You can also compare what drove our interest last year versus this year in our Flashback article.

If you’re wondering what it takes to rule the online roost—or, in other words, why is Britney so popular—visit our late-breaking blog for more insight. The blog will also feature more top 10 lists such as the most popular celebrity babies to the most intriguing critters (including Bigfoot sightings in Search).

Vera H-C Chan

Senior editor, Buzz Log

The holiday season of lights, trees, wreaths, and gift-shopping is upon us. With the current state of the economy, there’s the temptation to say “bah-humbug” to it all, but even if you’re on a budget, there are still ways to share holiday cheer and goodwill.

With just few weeks to the holidays, there’s still ample time to create meaningful, homemade gifts for friends and family.

Getting crafty is easy with CRAFT Magazine’s Paper Crafts feed. They’ve got wonderful paper craft suggestions for the holidays. From a cool snowstorm paper garland to modern, paper ornaments, the ideas are fresh, stylish, and limitless.

Another great craft resource is FamilyFun.com. They’ve got a wide range of holiday crafts and recipe ideas that are fast and easy to make for kids and adults.

Also check out Suite 101.com’s Kids Crafts Articles feed which features a fun assortment of easy holiday projects for kids.

Now is also a great time to select Holiday themes for your My Yahoo! tabs. There are plenty of them to choose from: Gifts Galore, Hanukkah, Holiday Wrap, Sleigh Bells, or simply Winter. From Choose Theme select Seasonal, and you can view the available options.

Happy Holidays!

Helen
- My Yahoo! Editorial

Helpful tips and advice can simplify the holidays and ultimately help your bottom line, and the advice from these sources are worth their weight in holiday gold.

With the help of Christmas tips and tricks from Organized Christmas, you’ll be able to countdown the days to Christmas with holiday cheer.

For the latest news on all things Hanukkah, along with holiday tips and advice, you’ll want to check out Hanukkah News.

And for the latest news on all things Christmas, check out Christmas News. It’s a round-up of interesting Christmas news from thousands of sources.

If you’re still feeling the “bah-humbug” creeping up on you (even after all I’ve shared!), the Flickr Christmas Lights photo pool is sure to banish any hint of the Scrooge spirit.

Happy Holidays!

Helen
- My Yahoo! Editorial

We have some exciting news to share. Starting today, you’ll be able to add a cool new kind of content to your My Yahoo! page. We call ‘em Open Apps (or “apps” for short), but you may also know them as “widgets” or “gadgets”. There are a few things that make Open Apps especially exciting:

• Open Apps give you more interactive tools for your My Yahoo! page. Any developer with a great idea can create a useful Open App for you to add to your page. For example, our friends at LabPixies have created a nifty Calorie Calculator app that lets you set a daily calorie target and then make a note of the things you eat during the day (try it out).

• Open Apps can help you keep up with the people you care about. As you set up your connections with friends and family through your profile on Yahoo!, these new apps can use those connections to enrich your My Yahoo! experience. For example, the fine folks at Flixster have created Flixster Movies, which gives you all the info you’d expect for top movies and new releases, plus a view of your friends’ ratings & reviews. You can even see which movies your friends want to see!

• Open Apps can connect you to people with similar interests. Let’s say you’re a diehard fan of the Green Bay Packers or the TV show “The Office”. Question: Where do you go to find other Cheeseheads or show off your Dunder Mifflin trivia knowledge? Answer: Open Apps. For example, our partners at Watercooler have built a whole bunch of “Addicted to…” apps for popular TV shows and a complete series of “Fans” apps for NFL and NBA teams. Each of these apps gives you access to episodes, quotes, trivia, quizzes, discussion – pretty much everything you could ask for when you want to immerse yourself in your favorite obsession.

These are just a few examples of the Open Apps that are available today. You’ll be able to find more by browsing the new Open Apps category in our content gallery or by searching in the gallery for “Open Apps.” You can also give and get apps from friends. To share an app, click on the “Options” menu in the app and choose “Share this application”. Over the next few months you’ll start seeing messages in more places around Yahoo! that say things like “James is now using Addicted to The Office”– click on one of these to get the app for yourself.

Before I go back to playing, err…working with apps, I should tell you that each app on your My Yahoo! page has a corresponding full-page view where you get access to even richer functionality for that app. Sometimes, when you interact with an app on your My Yahoo! page, it will take you to its full-page view. You can go to the full-page view by clicking on the app’s “Options” menu and then choosing “Zoom In”. To get back to My Yahoo!, click on the “Options” menu and then choose “Zoom Out”. If you end up on the full view of an app that you’ve never added to your My Yahoo! page, just look for the “Add to My Yahoo!” link towards the top right.

That should be enough to get you started with Open Apps. Remember, today is only the beginning—in the coming weeks and months we expect hundreds, even thousands, of open apps to become available for you to add to your My Yahoo! page.

Oh, if you’re a developer and would like to create your own app to share, see our guidelines on the Yahoo! Developer Network.

–james
My Yahoo! Product Lead

For those of us who still have last-minute shopping to do this weekend, bargain shopping for gifts is still possible.

Check out a shopping tab from Sammy, who responded to our invitation to share preloaded tabs. Sammy’s tab features a terrific assortment of shopping deal feeds from across the Web. Add it to your page!

Also, being frugal during the holidays doesn’t mean you can’t have fun. Fun Being Frugal hunts down great holiday bargains and freebies.

We’ve got to give a shout out to Dealcatcher.com. Thanks to the amazing community of users updating the site, you can score some great discounts and deals.

Happy Holidays from the My Yahoo! Team!